[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Yes, I remember watching it on PBS, and then again on Amazon Prime. Sadly they only did 5 episodes, so far as I can tell. It was a series that I thought had a lot of potential to go further, but apparently ITV didn't agree.

IIRC from reading about it well after it was off the air (thank you, library DVDs for letting me discover a whole bunch of stuff long after the fact), they did the filming for Heat of the Sun in Zimbabwe and that was about the point when the political situation was starting to get really unstable.

It's a shame, because I could have happily watched several more years' worth of it if they'd kept the quality up.

Anyway, prioritizing my reading from the stack of stuff due at the library on the possibility that I may not be in a position to easily return it when it actually becomes due.

Accordingly, read Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory's latest collaboration, The House of Four Winds, which is the 1st in their "One Dozen Daughters" series of AU historical-ish fairy tale-ish fantasies which apparently really are going to try for a dozen books to cover each daughter.

This is set in an alternate real-world universe roughly 1700-1800s-ish, where "thaumaturgy" has kind of always had a major influence in things but has recently-ish undergone a church/state separation and become its own Industrial Revolution, or something like it, so our heroine hails from the land of "Albion", where Marlowe wrote plays and Plato was a Magus (not in Albion, though), and there are further-out lands such as "Khemet" (aka Egypt) and "Hind" (aka India).

Aside from that setup, the premise of this is that our heroine, Clarice (a name I can never think of without associating with The Silence of the Lambs), is the eldest daughter of twelve daughters of the tiny impoverished duchy of Swansgard, which cannot afford to support or dower a full 12 princesses, and thus has equipped them to seek out their fortunes and stop being a drain on the treasury which will one day be passed down to their one and only brother, who happens to be the youngest of the lot.

Now at this point, I suspect the Gentle Reader is supposed to go "yay! 12 entire kickass heroines to read about going about seeking out their fortunes on adventures trickled out slowly at the rate of one a year, whee!", but I freely admit to being a bad Gentle Reader and thinking that male-exclusive primogeniture has a hell of a lot to answer for.

You see, neither Clarice nor her sisters can inherit Swansgard at all, even if there weren't a younger brother involved, and in fact it was trying for said younger brother to be heir rather than some distant cousins which produced said 12 daughters to begin with, which seems like a very wasteful thing in terms of human labour and resources, even in a magically-assisted age.

I recently spent a mere two days in hospital with very severe abdominal pain and infection which thankfully turned out not to be the appendicitis I'd been suspecting it was, and that was just a one-time incident which I quite sincerely hope will never be repeated in my lifetime, much less escalated to anything worse, and I had pain-killing drugs for part of it. I'm still on them now, actually, and due to pop in another dose Real Soon Now.

So, purely as an impartial observer to the process, it seems to me that voluntarily undergoing childbirth which would presumably involve approximately 2 days worth of severe abdominal pain in the form of labour (and probably undrugged with anything really effective), not to mention the preceding 9 months of discomfort and the follow-up post-partum recovery, not just once, but 13 entire times, just to provide a direct-line blood heir to your husband who presumably does not come from an evil wastrel family if you married and did not end up killing him, is not a sign of romantic attachment to one's spouse or commitment to one's familial duty or whatever, but rather one of insanity or masochism or some combination thereof.

Seriously, I'd think that after popping out no later than the 4th attempt, all the titled and wealthy childbearing women in the land would band together and either covertly or overtly start pushing for changes to the laws of the land to allow for at least direct-line female inheritance, even if male primogeniture still came first.

It's certainly the sort of thing that I'd be pushing a presumably-loving spouse with law-making powers to do, even if my hypothetical cultural status was no more than the food preparer cum decorative bedmate cum generational incubator that so many pre-Industrial fantasies seem to think that non-Special female characters were relegated to and I'd be more than happy to wield the Frying Pan Of Doom to crush the skulls of my enemies apply persuasive arguments to the opposition, in the service of campaigning for great justice.

But I digress.

Anyway, the backstory of the setting of this novel was actually rather more interesting than the ostensible actual story. I want to find out more about the point-of-departure, the schism in which Church thaumaturgy was declared to be separate from secular thaumaturgy and the Cromwell-esque Reformation temp-ban on the practice that's hinted at, and the greater integration of more foreign lands wielding more autonomy and trade influence and being less colonized, presumably due to their own thaumaturgical prowess.

Instead, I got to read about the swashbuckling adventures of Princess Clarice of Swansgard-in-disguise as "Mr. Clarence Swann", on a trip to gather the reputation to become a great swordsmaster-in-disguise, because of course even with several millenia's worth of the size-and-strength athletic differential between the biological sexes being offset by the levelling equalizer of magic learnable by anybody without any inborn talent needed for it and apparently not gender-restricted educationally, women Still Can't Do Stuff Or Be Taken Seriously When They Try, sigh.

Aside from that, I did somewhat like Clarice as a character, who had an unobjectionable Standard Action Girl sort of personality.

The actual problem came from the villainous setup and their plotty plots that plotted, which were all rather over-the-top. The chief skill of any Lackey villain must be the moustache-twirl, and these were no exception, being Lulzy Evil types that merrily end lives just to feel powerful and see the lowly peons die.

Anyway, as part of her adventure-going, Clarice takes passage on a ship that turns out to be in the thrall of one of said villainous types who of course has a hidden agenda and yadda yadda terrible things occur and there's pirates involved and then there's more villainous types with hidden agendas and more terrible things occur and along the way there's an enchantment that only True Love can break.

And of course you can guess whose True Love is going to be the feature of the curse-breaking, and you can probably guess the faux-difficulties that their current guise is supposed to be causing. (And no, it didn't involve a desparate quest for the seafaring locating of some fava beans and a nice Chianti to supplement a humanitarian meal set as a challenge from the villain to free the captives, which would have been more interesting, IMHO.)

This is what comes of setting your adventure-with-romantic-elements in such a boringly unimaginatively heteronormative societal setting that you didn't even bother to alter the slightest bit for your magical AU.

More than twice (I'd have said "just once", but I actually have seen this happen about twice in fiction that I've read), I'd like to see the Grand Confession Of Our Hero/ine In Disguise's True Gender not being met with relief because Ooh, That Takes Care Of Some Troubling Urges That Had Been Worrying Me, but instead if not outright disappointment that they weren't actually the gender they were presenting as which the prospective beloved preferred, then at least outright indifference because eh, it works out to the same feelings anyway and either way you make a really attractive fill-in-the-blank* so what do mere underwear contents matter when I can see perfectly serviceable fingers and a tongue from right here?

I'm kind of reminded of the remark that people sometimes make that forget dragons and zombies and magic, the real fantasy kicks in when authors start writing about egalitarian treatment for women and minorities and other marginalized groups into their plots, rather than as exotic accessories to the bog-standard protagonist types.

Mild recommendation if you're into AU-ish magical "real-world" universe fairy-tale-ish adventure fantasy with romantic elements, such as Lackey's prior Elemental Masters and One Hundred Kingdoms series, and if you liked those you'll probably like this. It's perfectly cromulent for what it is, and world-building setup unexamined assumptions quibbles aside, the actual adventure story is reasonably solid, if rather conventionally standard, and the faux-historical background of this is just interesting enough that I'd be willing to try further books from the library to find out a bit more.

Quality-wise, it's actually one of the better recent Lackeys that I've read (and she's had some fairly dreadful continuations of her Valdemar series that I've sat through out of sheer morbid curiosity), and relatively low-ish on her more irritating usual writing tics (e.g., the wangsty bullied-by-age-peers outcast teenage protagonist who whines a lot about having great responsibility to go with great power while being enabled and indulged by the Special People Who Matter Who Naturally See And Understand Their Real Worth, the "I'm so evil, watch me eat this kitten" villain internal monologue rants, the griping about the terrible status quo of the almost comically unjust society one is attempting to overturn instead of I don't know, occasionally writing about a society that has become better already and the problems that can still be found there, etc.). I suspect having Mallory as a co-writer helped smooth out some of that, even if the result is a little bland.

* Insert my standard "bisexuals exist, dammit!" rant here.